“When I was your age, we couldn’t go to a football game and check our fantasy stats from our seats. We had to get up and wait in line for an Internet kiosk. A kiosk!!! Oh, and Candlestick Park was the best stadium ever.” As seen in 1995, these free stations were set up around what was then called 3COM Park.

We can laugh at this now, but for sheer inventiveness with the available technology, we tip our caps. Decades before the Apple Watch in 1984, Seiko took this embryonic stab at the smartwatch by using a standard calculator that could be used as a keyboard. It could store 2,000 characters, and it retailed for $80.

Casio called this the “world’s smartest cigarette” in 1978, though they couldn’t have been saying that with a straight face. No statistics on how many college dorm fires this caused, but it must have been a dope icebreaker at parties.

In the late 1990s, Diba introduced this Web-browsing device for TVs that came with a remote control. TV browsing never did take off, and since then people have gone online with increasingly smaller screens.

You might recognize the guy on the left in this 1984 photo: Steve Jobs, posing with the original Macintosh computer – the first affordable computer with a graphical user interface. At right is Apple CEO John Sculley with the computer the Macintosh helped kill: the Lisa, which turned out to be the first unaffordable computer with a graphical user interface.

Named after Jobs’ daughter, the Lisa was designed for the business crowd, but its eye-popping price of $9,995 (that’s $23,800 today), combined with the Mac’s relatively bargain price of $2,495, was its undoing.

We don’t want to imagine how many parents in the late 70s trolled little kids like this with the promise of a pet, only to snicker when the gift-wrapping was opened. Still, this was a big deal for its time: released in 1978, it’s among the earliest user-friendly computers made for the home and schools, and with the monitor attached to the terminal, you don’t have to squint too hard to see a resemblance to the first Macintosh. That said, you can get carpal-tunnel syndrome just from looking at that scrunched keyboard.

What’s that dark blocky thing on the left side of the PET? It’s a cassette drive, which is how you used to store data in the olden days. And if you’re wondering about the computing power of this electronic pyramid, it started at a wimpy 4K of RAM.

"Woz." (San Francisco, 1991). "Apple Computer cofounder Steve Wozniak (middle) and John Sculley, CEO (right), looking at an early Nintendo Game Boy before taking the stage at an Apple product announcement."

"Woz." (San Francisco, 1991). "Apple Computer cofounder Steve Wozniak (middle) and John Sculley, CEO (right), looking at an early Nintendo Game Boy before taking the stage at an Apple product announcement."

Photo: �2014 Doug Menuez

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DriverGuide navigation system

Before Google Maps and before Mapquest, if you wanted to avoid asking for someone for directions, you had this. In 1987, a startup named Karlin & Collins placed dozens of coin-operated DriverGuide kiosks around Bay Area car rental agencies and hotel lobbies, using mapping technology they created. For most, it was the first time they could get automated turn-by-turn directions, though it was hardly affordable – each kiosk cost $12,000.

Creating a navigation system like this for every city was too expensive at the time, though, and by the early 90s the company (which changed its name to NavTek) focused on licensing its technology to other companies.

Back in the day, pocket calculators weren’t the stuff of nerd parodies – they were cool enough to be sold by models. And the trendiest ones weren’t even called calculators. In 1972, HP hailed the 9-ounce “Shirt Pocket Answer Machine” as a compact alternative to the bulkier desktop calculators of yesteryear. The company said the HP-35 could perform "intricate calculations that are now handled only with larger calculators in the laboratory or office." Whether any A students were able to impress women like this with such facts is unclear.

It’s a far cry from Siri, but this was fashionable enough to be sold by Bloomingdale’s for $395 when it was released in 1976. The Speech Plus calculator, designed by Palo Alto’s Tele‐Sensory Systems, was originally created for the blind before it was introduced to the much more lucrative kids’ education market. A New York Times article likened the machine’s digitzed voice to Hal from Stanley Kubrick’s “2001.”

Alas, in 1982 another science-fiction movie helped send the Speech Plus to the bargain bin. A certain friendly alien from a certain Steven Spielberg flick discovered the Speak and Spell, and the rest is history.

Overheard in 1982: “I’m so cool. How cool am I? I keep a computer in my briefcase. Don’t even need to plug it in! Sometimes I take it out and use it in my car. To recap: I’m cool.” The HP-75 was Hewlett-Packard’s first handheld portable computer, with a magnetic memory card reader, ports for memory expansion, and the ability to connect to a printer. It sold for $995, which is a lot to pay for a souped-up, one-line text editor. But did we mention how cool you were if you had one?

The rise of Doom and other first-person, three-dimensional video games in the mid-1990s led to this mouse on steroids. While first-person games live on, this did not. The Centre for Computing History includes this review: “It seemed like such a good idea; take a mouse, and stick it on top of a joystick... The problem was, the implementation of the idea sucked. It would drag horribly if you tried to slide it while tilting it, and in order to tilt it forward, you had to wrap your thumb and pinky finger down around the sides, because any downward pressure on the front would cause unwanted pressing of the buttons.”

A plasma screen… on a laptop! This must have been pretty baller in 1986, when the GRiDcase was released as the first battery-powered plasma display PC. That plasma power came at a cost though: the battery only lasted an hour per charge.

It’s not quite Pixar, but this cartoon animator is using SIGGRAPH software on an Amiga computer. Amiga, yet another 1980s computer brand that bit the dust.

Old-timey computer animation

It’s not quite Pixar, but this cartoon animator is using SIGGRAPH software on an Amiga computer. Amiga, yet another 1980s computer brand that bit the dust.

Photo: The Chronicle

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NeXT Computer

A future presidential ticket? Only half-true. Steve Jobs and behind him, investor (and future presidential candidate) Ross Perot, tout the brand-new NeXT Computer in 1988 in San Francisco. Jobs left Apple to create the NeXT, and while its design may not look like much now, its die-cast magnesium cube and optical drive instead of a hard drive were innovative in their time. But that innovation came at a price: Marketed for higher education and commercial use, the NeXT retailed for up to $10,000.

Steve Jobs takes the stage at SF’s Fort Mason in 1989 to demonstrate the NeXT. Jobs’ passion project never did take off – NeXT only sold an estimated 50,000 units. But its cutting-edge technology helped it become the first Web server. As for Jobs, rumor has it he came up with some other ideas.

In 1983, Coleco had already made a hit video-game console, so they thought they’d make a hit home computer. Not so much. The Adam, with its cassette-drive storage, was riddled with technical problems – if you had your cassette in the drive upon startup, its data was known to be deleted by a power surge. The blog Coding Horror adds of the cassettes, “I could handle the slowness, but they also had a very unfortunate tendency to unspool. And when you've spent the last week writing the ultimate tank combat game – which happens to be stored on that unspooled tape – you develop some serious tape surgery skills, stat.”

Epson made some of the earliest laptops, including this 5-pounder in 1984 that was much svelter than many of its contemporaries. On the other hand, part of the reason it was so compact is that it had a squint-and-you-might-see-it, eight-line monitor, and no internal disk drive. What it did have, though, was a micro-cassette tape drive, and you can’t get much more retro than that.

Corporate execs are useless, amirite? That’s why this came along in 1984 – a touchscreen- and voice-operated workstation for people in business who didn’t want to bother with all that typing nonsense. The cost of this really massive early iPhone? $30,000. These terminals didn’t catch on in offices, but they did in dive bars.

It’s a telephone! It’s a computer! It’s a telephone computer! The Cedar was designed for offices, and back when fax machines were a part of daily life, this offered an advanced alternative – for a lofty $5,000.

For when you didn’t have any bills in your pocket, you could use this, also being introduced in 1983, at the San Francisco Public Library.

Coin-operated computers

For when you didn’t have any bills in your pocket, you could use this, also being introduced in 1983, at the San Francisco Public Library.

Photo: The Chronicle

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Gibson Light Pen

Life was just better when you could draw on your Apple computer screen while sporting a rockin’ mustache, as these two Koala Technologies execs could attest in 1984. The light pen was an ancestor to the stylus that wrote on people’s PDAs in the 1990s.

Those aren’t stereo speakers in the back – they’re what high-end office computers used to look like in 1981. The Eclipse was a 32-bit virtual memory computer with 4 gigs of virtual address space – which is a good thing, because the real-life space it gobbled up was enormous. How much did it cost, you ask? A mere $8,800.

A tiny calculator that prints! This might still be kind of cool if you could text on it. Canon came up with this, the TP-X, in 1985.

Canon “pocket printer” calculator

A tiny calculator that prints! This might still be kind of cool if you could text on it. Canon came up with this, the TP-X, in 1985.

Photo: Handout

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The Hyundai PC

For a while there in the late 80s, “Attack of the Clones” wasn’t a bad George Lucas movie. Rather, it meant all the companies looking to cash in with their own IBM-compatible computers – or clones. In 1986, Hyundai stayed true to its brand by offering the cheapest clone money could buy: the Blue Chip. It retailed for $699, and for a few years, sales grew. But by the early 90s, with desktop PCs saturating, Hyundai went back to focusing on affordable cars.

Whoa, two outdated machines in the same photo! It may as well be an abacus now, but the stock selector, seen here in 1976, could connect to a computer to give analysts something resembling real-time stock quotes.

Tandy gave a good run at the affordable home-computer market in the mid-1980s – this one was released in 1987, with 7.16 MHz of processing speed, 256KB of RAM, and MS-DOS 2.11 with built-in ROM allowing startup without a disk present – aren’t you glad you don’t need to worry about things like built-in ROM anymore?

We see people with bulky laptops of the 1980s like this one, and we hope there wasn’t a mass epidemic of office workers gone sterile. This one from Toshiba weighed 16½ pounds, with a gas-plasma display. The first T3100’s hard drive could handle only 10MB, though it could be expanded to 80.

Long before data visualization became the stuff of Internet memes, this became the first public calculator to display numeral equations as graphs when it was introduced in 1985.

Casio FX-7000G calculator

Long before data visualization became the stuff of Internet memes, this became the first public calculator to display numeral equations as graphs when it was introduced in 1985.

Photo: Handout

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Hewlett-Packard Portable computer

They didn’t call this a laptop when it came out in 1984 – and how could they when it would feel like Santa sitting on your lap? – but HP’s 110 computer was among the earliest of its species. It ran on a 5.33-MHz processor with a whopping 272 KB or RAM. This for high-powered execs only, retailing for $2,995.

Yup, Atari made more than just video-game consoles in its heyday. They were ahead of the pack for a little while, too: In 1985, this was hailed as the first personal computer with 1 megabyte of memory from a leading manufacturer (Pac-Man not included). The price: $999.95.

Have you hard of Mindset computers? Neither had we. But the company was a real thing when it released a PC in 1984 that had a graphical user interface, like the Macintosh. It had great initial reviews, like the Macintosh. But unlike the Macintosh, it didn’t sell. But hey, neither did the DeLorean, and that was a well-designed piece of machinery too.

PC magazine called this 1993 PDA “the first true “phablet” (as in smartphone-tablet). Not that it matters when you go out of business a year later, as EO did after being bought by AT&T. The EO had a touchscreen that worked with a pen, a wireless modem, and 4 MB of RAM. None of that was enough to outhustle Apple’s Newton.

As seen in 1992. We have a love-love relationship with this pre-iPhone method of keeping score in your tennis matches.

The Tennis Analyst

As seen in 1992. We have a love-love relationship with this pre-iPhone method of keeping score in your tennis matches.

Photo: Handout

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Super-sized calculators

These math bricks were seen at a San Francisco Computronics store in 1974, retailing for up to $80.

Super-sized calculators

These math bricks were seen at a San Francisco Computronics store in 1974, retailing for up to $80.

Photo: The Chronicle

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Timex Sinclair 1000 computer

The Sinclair 1000 was very small, and it was cheap – launched in 1982 for $99.95, it was the cheapest home computer in history. But there was a price for paying such a low price: the membrane keyboard gave people fits, and most fruit flies had more memory in than the 2 KB this came with. That thing piggybacking the computer in this photo is a 16 KB memory expansion, which sold for an extra $50. Timex went on to make many more watches, but they couldn’t keep up with the Apples of the world in computing.

It’s debatable which is more dated – this machine or this hairstyle. But in the 80s and early 90s, people had to use floppy disks to store info. And that meant having to sit down and copy them for minutes at a time, which was about as fun as it sounds. A company named ALF Products (not related to Alf from the 80s TV show) sold this disk copier, which it said was “as easy to use as a toaster."

For business types who didn’t want to be weighed down by back-breaking laptops, HP offered “a computer the size of a calculator” in 1991. That portability came at a price, though: the 95LX sold for $695 – that’s $1,210 in today’s dollars. We hope that Lotus spreadsheet was really worth it.

A calculator on steroids? Nope, it’s a standalone word processing machine from 1987. This bad boy could hold 50,000 characters in its memory, and it had a nifty way of printing: just slide paper through the bottom of it. It cost $295 in its day, which is $295 more than something like this would sell for today.

Here in 1988, the Chronicle pays a visit to Berkeley’s Natural Languages Inc., which pioneered database software that provided what we take for granted today: making search queries in simple English rather than SQL computer talk.

Another “did you know?” brand that was more famous for other products but took a stab at computers in the 1980s. Sure, the design of this 12-pound, 1988 laptop is bulkier than a gyro sandwich, but it’s also innovative: note the twin pop-up floppy disk drives.

Dolch Computer Systems’ laptop in an aluminum briefcase was made less for the boardroom and more for the battlefield. Hence the very unsleek, rugged design of this model from 1988. The San Jose company kept on serving its niche market until it was bought in 2005.

Released in 1983, and an ingenious way to do your homework and play Pac-Man at the same time.

Spectravideo SV-318 computer keyboard

Released in 1983, and an ingenious way to do your homework and play Pac-Man at the same time.

Photo: Los Angeles Times Syndicate

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IBM handheld wireless PC

Before you could sync devices with the cloud, you could get this, as shown in 1991. The IBM handheld could transmit to nearby computers.

IBM handheld wireless PC

Before you could sync devices with the cloud, you could get this, as shown in 1991. The IBM handheld could transmit to nearby computers.

Photo: The Chronicle

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Teletype Corporation terminal

We don’t have much to say about the technology in this 1981 photo – it’s just another defunct computer company. We just love the contrast in hair between the office workers.

Teletype Corporation terminal

We don’t have much to say about the technology in this 1981 photo – it’s just another defunct computer company. We just love the contrast in hair between the office workers.

Photo: Handout

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Daisywriter printer

In 1983, back when you could bench-press your home printer for a solid workout, the Daisywriter daisy-wheel printer was among the best in its class. Marketed as a “letter-quality” printer, it could print in multiple languages, print graphics, and use such fancy-schmancy type as underline or shadow.

Robots are being used to deter homeless people from setting up camp in San Francisco

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A security robot has been put to work in San Francisco in an attempt to deter homeless people from forming tent cities.

The robot uses lasers and sensors to monitor an area for criminal activity. Rather than intervene during a crime, it alerts human authorities.

The robot's owner, the San Francisco SPCA, said it has seen fewer tents and car break-ins since it deployed the robot in the city's Mission neighborhood.

In San Francisco, autonomous crime-fighting robots that are used to patrol parking lots, sports arenas, and tech company campuses are now being deployed to keep away homeless people.

The San Francisco Business Times reported last week that the San Francisco SPCA, an animal advocacy and pet adoption group, put a security robot to work outside its facilities in the gentrifying Mission neighborhood. The robot's presence is meant to deter homeless people from setting up camps along the sidewalks.

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Hubo the humanoid robot took part in the 2019 Winter Olympic Games torch relay in the South Korean city of Daejon on Monday, becoming the first robot to have the honor.

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Last week, the City of San Francisco ordered the SF SPCA to keep its robot off the streets or be fined up to $1,000 per day for operating on sidewalks without a permit, according to the Business Times.

Krista Maloney, media relations manager for the SF SPCA, told Business Insider that staff wasn't able to safely use the sidewalks at times because of the encampments. Maloney added that since the SPCA started guarding its facilities with the robot — known as K9 — a month ago, the homeless encampments have dwindled and there have been fewer car break-ins.

K9 is part of a crime-fighting robot fleet manufactured and managed by startup Knightscope in Mountain View, California. The company's robots don't fight humans; they use equipment like lasers, cameras, a thermal sensor, and GPS to detect criminal activity and alert the authorities.

Their intent is to give human security guards "superhuman" eyes and ears, according to Bill Santana Li, CEO of Knightscope, who spoke with Business Insider earlier this year.

Knightscope rents out the robots for $7 an hour — less than a security guard's hourly wage. The company has over 19 clients in five US states. Most customers, including Microsoft, Uber, and Juniper Networks, put the robots to work patrolling parking lots and office buildings.